Yearly Archive: 2015

31

I could post a wrap up of all that was good and bad in the world this year, but there are writers who have done a far better job at that than I could at this moment. I could post about everything that happened personally, and what I’m hoping for in 2016, but Austin is cooking and we have friends coming over in a bit, so I’ll save that for my birthday post. For now, I will say that 2015 was challenging in ways I didn’t expect, and I have high hopes for a great 2016.

Most important, however, is the fact that today is our four-year anniversary of being caregivers to Jameson and Tigger, the two best orange tabbies a gal could dream of. They have their own personalities and they can be little assholes at times, but at the end of the day, when Jameson snuggles up next to me and Tigger either plops into his little bed or flops onto Austin’s feet, I’m extremely happy that we brought them home four years ago today.

13

– “I just wanted to let you know that I don’t have any respect for you as a teacher, not a professor, I refuse to call you that. And the reason I don’t have any respect for you is because you obviously have no self-respect at all. How am I supposed to respect you if you can’t respect yourself at all. And you know what really kills me about it is that you don’t feel bad about how you look or how you .. put yourself out there. You don’t look good. You need to take better care of yourself.” I Was Trolled and Fat-Shamed by One of My Male College Students (h/t @KateHarding)

Gun Violence

– “To find in that wording an individual right to possess a firearm untethered to any militia purpose, the majority performed an epic feat of jurisprudential magic: It made the pesky initial clause about the necessity of a “well regulated Militia” disappear. Poof! Gone. Scalia treated the clause as merely “prefatory” and having no real operative effect—a view at odds with history, the fundamental rules of constitutional interpretation, and the settled legal consensus for many decades.” The Second Amendment Was Never Meant to Protect an Individual’s Right to a Gun (h/t @mskatemurphy)

– “You earn the right to own and drive a vehicle; earn the right to own and use a gun. Quibble with me over semantics if you want to; what is a “right” vs. what is a “privilege.” I’ll be busy with my friends and colleagues trying to prevent more unnecessary deaths.” Dear America: Here’s Your Gun Solution (via @SaraJBenincasa)

– “e’ve been fighting this battle for quite some time. Soccer, to be honest, is not meant to be played on turf. The ball rolls differently. There are dead spots on every turf field that you play on. It’s a lot harder on the joints, on the body, on the shoulders, on the knees. It’s a just a different playing game. With that said, you don’t see the men ever playing on turf. You don’t see any World Cups being played on turf—even when the major club teams come to America to play on a turf stadium, they lay sod.” We Talked to Hope Solo About Why the US Women’s Soccer Team Skipped a Game in Protest (via @MotherJones)

Sexual Assault

– “I imagine there will be some who will say, “But what about James Deen’s side to this story? What about evidence?” As is the case with the vast majority of rape accusations, especially between intimate partners, Stoya’s story of being raped by James Deen is very likely the only “evidence.” He is certainly within his rights to deny it, though it’s worth noting that he and his representatives have remained mute on the matter, and James has not responded to the text message I sent him yesterday. Like so many rape cases, this will very likely be a “he said/she said” situation. And as I tweeted last night, today and every day, I BELIEVE WOMEN.” Why The Frisky Will No Longer Be Publishing James Deen’s Sex Advice Column (h/t @IjeomaOluo)

Underrepresented Voices

– “In early 2015, Upworthy writer Parker Molloy tweeted a picture of a Kat Von D lipstick color called “Underage Red,” with, again, a tone of mild bemusement. In short order, however, Forbes and Business Insider decided Molloy was “outraged” and “disgusted”—and was also apparently multiple people. Before long, Kat Von D issued a statement refusing to yield to imaginary calls for her to pull the color from shelves, while also insinuating that only a pedophile would find the color name offensive. Way to strike a blow against hysteria and outrage there, Kat.” Rise of the Overreactionaries: Outrage Over Outrage as a Silencing Tactic (via @ZachBudryk)

4

I bought this book at noon today, and finished it tonight at 7PM. Admittedly, I bought it at the airport as I was FOUR HOURS early for my flight and really looking for something that might be a quick and compelling read. Woo, did I choose wisely.

The book is told in alternating chapters from the perspective (in the third person) of Kate, a single mother to 15-year-old Amelia, and in the first person from the perspective of Amelia herself. The Kate chapters start with Amelia’s death (ostensibly by suicide); Amelia’s chapters cover her life starting two months earlier, at the beginning of her sophomore year.

The main question we’re trying to figure out is whether Amelia has actually killed herself, or if someone else may have helped her off the roof of her school. There are multiple mysteries within this book – who really is Amelia’s father? Who is Ben? Why the fuck does Zadie hate her so much?

It’s possible I had a little more love for this book because it is set in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and the author (who lives there) calls out actual shops and restaurants that I used to visit. I could very vividly picture the scenes in the book because I’d actually been to those places. But mostly I think I enjoyed it because it was a well-told story. It was interesting, it wasn’t totally predictable (at least not to me), and the high-school students weren’t all silly or making utterly inexplicable decisions.

I think it’s worth a read. If you’re travelling over the holidays and find yourself looking for a book that will make the wait and the flight go by, this is a good choice.

3

This was on the recommended shelf at my favorite local bookstore, and it was a nice read. Probably more of a library read than one that I recommend buying, but definitely worth reading.

We start out at Grace’s trial. We don’t know exactly what she is on trial for, but this tells us that she has clearly survived being on the titular lifeboat. We immediately jump back to when she and 39 others from the Empress Queen ship find themselves in a lifeboat just over a year after the Titanic sinks. Mostly women, but a few men and one child, this group is stuck together until that rescue ship comes along.

It’s coming, right?

Right?

The book is interesting because it tells the story from a narrator who can’t possibly know everything, and it touches on very interesting philosophical questions. Basically, it’s like one big thought experiment. There is a lot going on for a bunch of people stuck on a small lifeboat, but at the same time we don’t get resolution to everything. I can’t figure out if this is brilliant storytelling (because do we every really know the full truth?) or lazy storytelling (because the author created this world, she can tell us the full truth if she wants). I devoured the first half, then somehow was distracted, but finished in on a flight maybe two weeks later. I think it’s worth a read if you come across it, but it isn’t a must read.

29

– In the aftermath of the attacks, the Photoshop-altered image of Mr Jubbal, shown above, was tweeted by user @Bl4ptrep with the caption: “One of the Paris suicide bombers’ photo’s [sic] been released. He posted the photo on twitter shortly before the attack.” Mr Jubbal is a fierce critic of Gamergate, regularly using Twitter to express his opinions, who became a target for the group’s more aggressive members after starting the hashtag #stopgamergate2014. He’s also an advocate for equal rights and a Sikh – which has led to the suggestion by some Gamergater supporters that Mr Jubbal is a terrorist, their reasoning based on a deliberately moronic conflation of Sikhism and Islam.” Gamergate Supporters Are Responsible for the Terrorist Photoshopping of Journalist Veerender Jubbal (via @vicegaming)

Racism

– “I said it was only me and, hands still raised, slowly descended the stairs, focused on one officer’s eyes and on his pistol. I had never looked down the barrel of a gun or at the face of a man with a loaded weapon pointed at me. In his eyes, I saw fear and anger. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw how it would end: I would be dead in the stairwell outside my apartment, because something about me — a 5-foot-7, 125-pound black woman — frightened this man with a gun. I sat down, trying to look even less threatening, trying to de-escalate. I again asked what was going on. I confirmed there were no pets or people inside.” My white neighbor thought I was breaking into my own apartment. Nineteen cops showed up. (via @washingtonpost)

– ““It was just a sea of white faces,” he told ThinkProgress. “A lady kicked me in the stomach. A man kicked me in the chest. They called me n*****, monkey, and they shouted ‘all lives matter’ while they were kicking and punching me. So for all the people who are still confused at this point, they proved what ‘all lives matter’ meant. It means, ‘Shut up, n*****.’”” The Man Beaten And Choked At A Donald Trump Rally Tells His Story (via @thinkprogress)

Refugees

– “It’s important to recognize that this is hardly the first time the West has warily eyed masses of refugees. And while some characterize Muslim arrivals as a supposedly unique threat, the xenophobia of the present carries direct echoes of a very different moment: The years before World War II, when tens of thousands of German Jews were compelled to flee Nazi Germany.” Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930s anti-Semitism (h/t @michaelianblack)

Sexism

– “Fairy Godboss is a resource for job applicants to research other women’s experiences with an employer. Among other things, it helps women determine whether or not gender discrimination is an issue at a company. The New York Post reports that their site is “like Yelp for maternity leave policies, sexual harassment, promotion opportunities, and salary information.”” Now You Can Review How Sexist Your Company Is with ‘Yelp for Women’ Site (h/t @PPact)

Student Protest

– “The true story of college students and mental health has to do with a hollowing out of the United States’ mental-health services, with overtaxed counseling centers, with a fundamental shift in the role that colleges serve, with changes in the composition of the nation’s student body. This is all very, very complicated, and none of it can be fairly summarized as “Kids these days are getting so fragile!”” The Myth of the Ever-More-Fragile College Student (h/t @studentactivism)

– “Framing free speech and political correctness as opposing forces is a false dichotomy intended to derail uncomfortable but necessary conversations, a smokescreen ginned up by the ethically lazy. The fact is, political correctness doesn’t hinder free speech – it expands it. But for marginalised groups, rather than the status quo.” ‘Political correctness’ doesn’t hinder free speech – it expands it (via @TheLindyWest)

Surveillance State

– “But their arguments are conflating the forest—bulk metadata collection—and the trees: access to individual communications about the attack. To understand why that’s the case, start with this tweet from former NSA and DHS official Stewart Baker: “NSA’s 215 program”—and by association the far larger metadata dragnet of which the domestically focused phone-metadata program is just a small part—“was designed to detect a Mumbai/Paris-style attack.” Only it didn’t.” Metadata Surveillance Didn’t Stop the Paris Attacks (h/t @glenngreenwald)

15

– “The nurse was caught off guard by my question – most people ask for help with getting pregnant, not the other way round. As nicely as possible, she answered, “To be honest, love, I can’t see that any doctor would think that’s a good idea. It’s not something we would want to allow until after you’ve had children, or once you’re past childbearing age.” And, there it is. I can’t be trusted to make decisions about my own body until it’s too late for it to matter.” Out of the void: A new kind of support system emerges for childfree women across the pond (h/t @nothavingababy)

– ““The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere’ We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!”” Black Mizzou Football Players Are Going on Strike Over Campus Racism (via @EdgeofSports)

Sharing Economy

– “Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind. While my family may be the first guests to speak out about a wrongful death at an Airbnb rental, it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. Staying with a stranger or inviting one into your home is an inherently dicey proposition.” Living and Dying on Airbnb (h/t @JessicaValenti)

13

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Paris six times in my life; I was just there again in March. It is one of my favorite places to be – I even spent my 30th birthday there, eating and drinking my way across the arrondissements. What is happening there today is breaking my heart.

8

– “If you don’t believe me, turn to Google News and see how many times this week our nation’s news writers and broadcasters deployed the phrase “doctors told him he’d never walk again.” It makes a good story. But how about the kid who will have to learn to navigate life in a wheelchair? Is he any less brave? How about the woman whose cancer came back, and who has chosen to stop chemotherapy and rely on palliative care? Is she a wimp? Is she a loser?” If survivors are “winners,” what should we call patients who die? (h/t @elementalnw)

Diversity

– “A particular low moment for Miley, he wrote, happened when he asked a question at Twitter’s engineering leadership meeting about what specific steps Twitter engineering was taking to increase diversity. Twitter’s senior VP of Engineering responded, “diversity is important, but we won’t lower the bar.” Miley did not name names in his post. A visit to the leadership page on Twitter’s website will reveal that the company’s SVP of engineering is Alex Roetter.” Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley Leaves Company Because Of Diversity Issues (h/t @tariqmoosa)

Racism

– “But, by this morning, a sick feeling started to set in when people started to contest my race. More than a few tweets came my way asking why the CBC was airing an all-white panel on the subject of diversity in politics. Good question, in any other context. Here’s the rub, if it’s still unclear: I am not, nor have I ever been, a white person.” I Was On A CBC Panel And The Internet Wanted To Guess My Race (h/t @ijeomaoluo)

– “Among other things, Foster’s lead prosecutor noted that several of the prospective black jurors he dismissed hadn’t made sufficient eye contact when he questioned them. In any case, it’s not hard to invent reasonable-sounding explanations for striking a juror, and therein lies the problem. Only when you run the numbers does the racist intent comes into sharp focus.” This Is How Prosecutors (Still) Keep Black People Off Juries (via @motherjones)

– “I didn’t want to write this review because I’m tired of writing about white people. I’m tired of fantasy worlds where people of color don’t exist. Where even the made up—excuse me—composite characters are white. It gets really disheartening to see yourself written out of popular culture, written out of history time and time again. It’s really hard to keep answering my son’s question: “How come there aren’t any brown people in this?”” Why I Won’t Write a Review of Suffragette (via @strangerslog)

1

– “While Garbage Time is simply a solid sports show, its popularity stems from Nolan’s ability to eviscerate deeply problematic behaviors and attitudes in the industry. She is relentless in speaking out against domestic violence perpetrated by athletes, as well as other inexcusable behavior that has previously been all but normalized in the sports world. She has pushed back on the relatively tacit acceptance of athlete Ray Rice’s domestic violence charges and skewered a sexist article titled “How to Land a Husband at the Masters,” published by another Fox News outlet.” Meet Fox Sports’ Katie Nolan, Who’s Tearing Down Sexism in Sports (h/t @GarbageTime)

Family Choice

– “Sometime later a doctor asked me why I still wanted birth control. “Married already, what’s the problem?” she said. And about a year after that a nurse took on the same line of questioning: “You sure you want [the pill]? Even after you stop taking it’ll be quite long before you get pregnant, you know!” (Which, by the way, is not necessarily true.) I’m also often asked by random acquaintances whether Calum and I have kids. When I answer in the negative, their responses are often along the lines of “oh, not yet ah” or “yes, you’re still young, there’s still time”. The possibility that we might have opted out of parenthood doesn’t even come into the conversation.” I don’t have kids. There is no “yet”. (h/t @nothavingababy)

Labor

– “But six months later, the financial results are starting to come in: Price told Inc. Magazine that revenue is now growing at double the rate before the raises began and profits have also doubled since then. On top of that, while it lost a few customers in the kerfuffle, the company’s customer retention rate rose from 91 to 95 percent, and only two employees quit. Two weeks after he made the initial announcement, the company was flooded with 4,500 resumes and new customer inquiries jumped from 30 a month to 2,000 a month.” After Company Raises Minimum Salary To $70,000, Revenue And Profits Double (h/t @GoldyHA)

– “The broader definition of trafficking as labor exploitation hasn’t done much to change public perception, though. When you say “trafficking” people still think sexual slavery. The Wikipedia entry on human trafficking, for example, begins by stating, “Human trafficking is the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labor, or commercial sexual exploitation”—a definition that begins and ends with sex. In reality, forced labor of other kinds—like domestic labor, construction and agriculture—is much more common, according to the ILO, which estimates that 4.5 million of 21 million people worldwide are victims of sex trafficking (though, again, all trafficking figures are notoriously slippery and poorly sourced).” “Human Trafficking” Has Become a Meaningless Term

Police Violence

– “As activist and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe points out, this position rests on a few different fallacies: first, that police are being less aggressive out of fear of being the next cop to have their tactics publicly scrutinized, and secondly, that aggressive policing leads to a reduction in violent crime. There is no evidence to support this, and if a nationwide decrease in police aggression is indeed underway, someone should tell the girl who was body-slammed and dragged by Officer Ben Fields at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, for her refusal to give her cellphone to a teacher. If aggressive policing, which includes the kind of violence recently caught on film, led to less crime, that would mean that the only thing law-enforcement agencies have come up with to reduce violence is the use of more violence, and the violation of people’s rights. In other words, the only way to prevent violent crime is martial law.” The Movement Against Police Violence Isn’t Ignoring ‘Black-on-Black Crime’ (via @mychalsmith)

Racism

– “What you see in that video is not an officer full of anger or fear or hatred. What you see is a man annoyed that he has to spend any time dealing with something as insignificant as a black girl. What you see is a man throwing out a bag of trash that just happens to be a person. This is the way in which black women in America have been treated throughout history.” America Doesn’t Care About Black Women And Girls (via @IjeomaOluo)

– “Schools are not merely sites of education, they are sites of control. In fact, they are sites of control well before they are sites of education. And for certain populations — students of color, working-class students, anyone on the margins — the sites of control in the school system can be incredibly restrictive, suffocating, perilous.” Where Are Black Children Safe? (via @rgay)

– “Here’s the thing: when asked during in-person meetings, 90% of my clients report having racial preferences. Which maybe doesn’t sound so bad, because I mean, they have other preferences, too. Height, religion, career paths, Netflix show most recently watched, the list goes on and on. But of the 90% of the reported racial preferences, 89.9% are preferences for white people. So . . . that is bad. And I’m not just talking about white-on-white preferences. I’m talking about all my clients, only 55% of whom identify as white.” Yes, Your Dating Preferences Are Probably Racist (via @ESTBLSHMNT)

– “The NCAA’s lack of concern about the sexual exploitation of hostesses shouldn’t be a complete shock—the organization isn’t particularly concerned with the economic exploitation of its athletes, either. In place of cash, programs turn to women as currency for players, to sex as a signing bonus, effectively shrugging and saying, What else are we to do? For the programs that exploit them, these women exist as props, not as people with agency. And when human beings are turned into prizes to be awarded for a job well done—into objects that can be abused without consequence—then a Louisville assistant paying for recruits to have sex is not such an anomaly after all.” Louisville’s Sex Scandal is a Symptom of a Broken College Sports System (via @scATX)

Transphobia

– “Transgender women have always been women; women who may opt to get surgery, women who may take hormones, but women nonetheless. Others who agree with you are often termed gender essentialists. That is to say, they believe that what makes a man or a woman – there is only a binary view of gender in this world – is biologically determined. These pre-determined traits define womanhood and manhood. For example: women are weak, submissive, have breasts, menstruate, and are passive while men are strong, dominant, have beards, are sexual, and active. The opinions you have and ideas that you support are ones that box in people, that don’t allow for humans to fully express themselves, and create a limiting view of what people of all genders could be.” Dear Germaine Greer: No, Trans Women Are Women (via @TheRainbowHub)

– “Lawyer Jane Faye told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “[Tara] has now been in a men’s prison for the past seven days. I spoke to her mother, she’s on a wing where the men are calling out ‘Tara, Tara, Tara, show us your tits’. She is being actually abused, harassed, and is in grave danger of assault everyday.” Tara was placed into the men’s prison as her legal gender is male, despite having lived her whole adult life as a woman and spending six years transitioning.”” Human rights lawyer fears Tara Hudson may “kill herself” after trauma of men’s prison (h/t @stavvers)

31

Ms. Benincasa is the author of two YA novels and one deeply honest and very entertaining memoir. This latest novel follows three high school sophomores and one very young teacher on a high school trip to DC. My local library somehow ignored the release date (November 3), and so yesterday I got told my hold notice was up. This book was so entertaining that I started it while working out this morning and didn’t end up putting it down (for real) until I finished it three hours later.

The book moves pretty quickly – the trip to DC is only two nights and three days long, so usually there wouldn’t be a ton of time to build the characters, and yet Ms. Benincasa manages to do just that. There are at least five, and more like ten characters that we are interested in learning more about, and we get, not the whole picture, but enough to not have them merge together in a blur of teenager-ness.

The main young teacher is very idealistic, and also romantically interested in the other chaperone. Every other chapter covers her being either a bit naïve about the students in her care or concerned about her interactions with her co-chaperone. Then there is a trio of sophomore girls whose story is covered in the in between chapters, seeking to have a little bit of extra fun while on their vacation. The convention of alternating chapters could have been a bit confusing, or taken the reader out of the story, but it works here.

There are moments when I was genuinely surprised at what happened, which, considering this isn’t a mystery novel, was a pleasant twist. And the characters weren’t caricatures, which could be easy enough to do with the storyline. Some were sexually experienced; some weren’t. Some were more politically aware and socially conscious; some weren’t. Not everyone was white, and not everyone was straight.

I’m pretty sure I’m always going to enjoy what Ms. Benincasa writes, and I’m looking forward to what comes next. She also holds a special spot in my writer heart, as she signed my notebook with the below message when I went to a reading and told her I was working on a book.